Dangers for elderly patients who regularly take opioid painkillers

It is often the arthritis sufferers among elderly patients who most regularly take painkillers, because their pain tends to be chronic. Adverse side-effects are not uncommon, especially with the opioid painkillers, which include codeine, morphine, methadone and brand names such as Demerol, Percocet, Percodan, Darvon, , Vicodin, and Lomotil. The side-effects can be very serious, even dangerous, e.g. more fractured bones. Read this report on MedicalNewsToday.

Yet there is a completely safe and very effective way to reduce the pain/severity of osteo-arthritis, and it does not involve taking pharmaceutical drugs. - You just need to avoid salt and salty food as much as you can. - The less salt you eat, the less pain you will experience from your arthritis...(o: And, since you will also lose some excess water weight from your body which salt has been holding there, there will be less wear and tear on your joints, not having to carry so much water around. - So give salt the elbow, and say goodbye both to so much pain and to dangerous drugs. - See salt/sodium in foods.

That UK prisoners who are no longer drug-dependant are being deliberately put back onto methadone beggars belief!

See the report in the Telegraph. - No, it's not a late April Fool joke. There really are criminally stupid decisions being made to put prisoners back onto extremely addictive methadone before their release from prison "to minimise the risk of them taking an overdose." I submit that this practice would undoubtedly increase the risk of further criminal activity and ill-health and unhappiness.

Does this country have a drugs policy or not? - I suggest it does have a drugs policy and I suggest that that drugs policy appears to be to promote the taking of pharmaceutical drugs when these are prescribed drugs, however harmful they are, however much they damage lives, as long as their sale brings profit to the drugs companies. The government seems only to want to discourage drug-taking when the drugs are illegal drugs that have not caused any enrichment to the bloated drug companies. My submission fits in with the scandalous, catastrophic waste of many millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on unneeded swine flu jabs (BBC News report) and with the persistant failure to put legal curbs on the over-prescribing of anti-psychotics: see http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/2010/04/anti-psychotics-double-risk-of.html

Scotland's Methadone Policy Comes in for Some Stick

Scotland's methadone policy is severely criticised in this BBC News Item.

I agree with the criticism. To get heroin addicts to take methadone for periods of many years (an example in the article is of a man put onto methadone at age 16 and still taking it 18 years later) in the hope of curing their heroin addiction is clearly illogical. Methadone itself is highly addictive and so there is a strong chance of converting a heroin addict into a person addicted to both heroin AND methadone. I consider methadone an example of expensive pharmaceutical junk.

And according to the article "it costs about £2,800 to fund methadone provision for one addict for one year, and the programme could be costing about £56m in total each year."

This methadone policy is obviously of little benefit to the addicts' health and is a scandalous expense to the public purse. It appears to me to have been invented and to be manufactured expressly to fleece the taxpayer, since it benefits the drug companies and their shareholders, and no-one else.

I for one do not approve of this expensive, and in my view, immoral, exercise in futility.

The way to get people off drugs is to get them off drugs, not to get them onto other or additional drugs.

I used to know a woman who had been prescribed amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant with a host of unpleasant and harmful side-effects, for post-natal depression and was still being prescribed it 30 years later! - This is madness...

Doctors and pharmacists are being warned by the National Patients Safety Agency to take greater care when prescribing or administering drugs.

Doctors are warned over drug deaths
Article in the Observer

Extract:

"Doctors and pharmacists are being warned by the National Patient Safety Agency to take greater care when prescribing or administering drugs. Eight NHS patients have died and 17,000 others been put at risk in 'incidents' involving powerful painkillers used by millions of Britons between January 2005 and December 2007.

On Friday the agency sent a 'rapid response report' - an official warning that is sent around the NHS when evidence emerges about a threat to patient safety - entitled 'Reducing Dosing Errors with Opioid Medicines'. It covers the 11 most common forms of opioids, such as morphine, methadone, fentanyl, diamorphine and oxycodone.

'Incidents have been reported to the National Reporting and Learning System concerning patients receiving unsafe doses of opioid medicines, where a dose or formulation was incorrect, based on the patient's previous opioid dose,' said the report.

Around 12 million prescriptions for opioids are issued every year."

If you want a drug-free way of reducing pain, try cutting down on salt and salty food. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/sodium_foods.html and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html